Monthly Archives: February 2003

The Washington Times reports that Democratic support for the filibuster against Miguel Estrada is slipping away. Four Democratic Senators have announced that they will vote in favor of a cloture motion, and at least one more is believed likely to do so. Still not enough for sixty votes, but with public pressure intensifying, the likelihood of the filibuster turning into a public relations disaster for the Democrats is increasing. »

Tony Blankley’s weekly column in the Washington Times is genuinely thought-provoking. He tries to take the long view on the American response to 9/11 and sense the consequences that are only beginning to unfold: “Unsteady leaders in uncertain times.” »

I don’t know how our friends at RealClearPolitics missed this one, but the best column on the Web this morning belongs to Yale freshman James Kirchik in the Yale Daily News. Kirchik takes an extended look at the visit of New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka to Yale from a variety of angles, none of them pretty. According to Baraka, Israel was complicit in the 9/11 attack on America. Kirchik »

The Democratic party’s strategy with respect to President Bush’s judicial nominations is coming into focus. Senate Democrats filibuster a highly quallified nominee, while their supporters, posing as voices of reason, propose an overhaul in the confirmation prcoess as the way out of the mess the Democrats have created. This, at least, is how I read this Washington Post op-ed by Walter Dellinger, a key Clinton Justice Department official. Dellinger says »

One DeWayne Wickham, writing in USA Today, evaluates the Presidential chances of Carol Moseley-Braun and concludes that she can’t win because she is a one-term Senator who was defeated in her re-election bid as a result, in large part, of her own shady financial dealings, and has done absolutely nothing in the four years that have elapsed since she was unceremoniously thrown out of office. No, just kidding. She can’t »

Robert Mugabe, speaking at the summit of the 116-member Non-Aligned Movement in Malaysia, demands that the United States dismantle its weapons of mass destruction. In typically colorful language, Mugabe said: “The United States, awakened to the implications of being the sole superpower, joined by Britain as a born-again colonialist, and other Western countries have turned themselves into fierce hunting bulldogs raring to go, as they sniff for more blood, Third »

Even the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen has his limits when it comes to dishonest liberal arguments against war with Iraq. Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean have managed to exceed those limits — Kucinich with claims that the war is about oil and Dean with his erroneous insistence that President Bush is acting “unilaterally.” Perhaps Cohen’s biggest concern is the one he expresses at the end of his column — that »

Rocket Man, I feel your pain. Like you, I believe (and said at the time) that Bush was ill-advised to take the U.N. detour. However, I don’t see it as a presidency-breaker. Sullivan, I think, is largely correct that most of the present farce will be forgotten if the war goes well. The one thing that will not easily be forgotten is the duplicity of France and Germany. That is »

Deacon tried to put an optimistic face on the endless soap opera surrounding Iraq, but I’m not buying it. Today the U.S. and Britain circulated a proposed U.N. resolution; the French and Germans are promoting a competing resolution that says, in part: “The conditions for using force against Iraq are not fulfilled: While suspicions remain, no evidence has been given that Iraq still possesses weapons of mass destruction or capabilities »

Ranger Sergeant Randy Shugart was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously in 1994. At the Medal of Honor ceremony Shugart’s father said to President Clinton that he was not fit to be commander in chief. When Mark Bowden was asked by the Philadelphia Inquirer to profile President Clinton for its Sunday magazine during the election campaign of 1996, that encounter became the focus of his profile. As Bowden met »

Actually, Saddam isn’t faring particularly well as a folk hero, at least in Indonesia. This t-shirt manufacturer says he’s only sold about 400 so far. He explains that so far, Saddam has not been as hot an item as Osama bin Laden “because many Indonesians understand he is not a completely pure Muslim. He has done bad things.” Think about that distinction for a moment. Apparently this particular t-shirt salesman »

Reader Dafydd ab Hugh notes that “the Left is already floating the trial balloons for what they will say when the catastrophic defeat occurs — that is, when America is victorious in Iraq.” Dafydd quotes an L.A. Times article, which we won’t link to because of their ridiculous registration (i.e., marketing survey) procedure. But the article begins like this, and, as Dafydd says, the whole point is in the first »

The column by Robert Kagan about France posted by Trunk today points out that even the Germans are questioning France’s approach to the U.S. regarding Iraq. I think this is because the French approach represents a serious departure from what had promised to be a reasonably successful method of coping with U.S. power. That method consisted of persuading the U.S. to participate in, and increasingly be bound by, multilateral organizations »

Peggy Noonan picks up the theme Hugh Hewitt explored in his last World Net Daily column on Bill Clinton. Why do liberal fools like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter feel free to breach the elementary rules of decorum that have constrained our earlier ex-presidents? Noonan contrasts Clinton and Carter with Nixon (as ex-vice president), Eisenhower and George Bush (41) — to the detriment of the former: “The anti-Ikes.” »